The Little Things
by Lizwontcry
Summary: Morgan is a wreck while her dad is in surgery, and Sara helps her get through the night. It's about relationships...with fathers, with the men they love, and with themselves.


**A/N - I've wanted to write this for a while but it took me this long to get it right. Thanks for reading, and I hope you dig it.**

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It was funny, the things she focused on while she waited for the news. Someone eventually gave her a jacket-even though outside it felt like, well, summer in Las Vegas, the hospital waiting room felt like a refrigerator. The jacket was huge on her-most things were, really-and this made her think of her very first date back in Los Angeles so many years ago. She and Davey Lane had played putt-putt and he gave her his letter jacket when she shivered in the late night breeze. She missed Davey at that moment, even though she hadn't even thought of him in years.

She felt a hand on her shoulder and heard a voice say softly, "Morgan?"

Morgan willed herself to come back to reality and looked up to see Sara's worried glance.

"I think you should eat this," Sara said, and offered Morgan a granola bar.

"Oh...oh, no, thank you, I'm not hungry." Morgan wasn't hungry, or thirsty, or sad, or happy...she wasn't anything, really. She was numb.

"I know you aren't, but you really should eat something. You can't survive on coffee alone. God knows we've all tried. And we may still be waiting for news a while."

Morgan took the granola bar and reluctantly unwrapped it and took a bite. If Sara hadn't been staring at her, she probably would have thrown it away. But Sara meant well. And Morgan considered herself lucky that her co-workers actually liked and seemed to respect her, even if she was the boss's daughter. From what she gathered, Ecklie had not been the nicest of supervisors to them over the years. Which didn't particularly surprise her. He hadn't been the nicest of fathers, either.

Sara sat down next to Morgan in one of the impossibly uncomfortable seats in the waiting room. Officers of the Metropolitan Las Vegas Police Department had come and gone all night long, and she accepted prayers and promises to keep her father in their thoughts, all while wanting to disappear for hours now. Morgan had been through some stuff in her life, but this? This was a friggin' nightmare.

When she finished the granola bar, Morgan got up to throw away the wrapper and get some more coffee. The coffee tasted like how her nightmare felt, but she needed it. She needed something to flow through her system to remind her that she was alive. And hopefully by the end of all this, her dad still would be, too.

Morgan sat back down and sighed. She shivered in her extra large jacket and tried to think of anything else but what was happening behind those closed doors. The good news was that DB had his granddaughter back. The cops found her in record time and the kidnapper was already in custody. It was 12 hours later and everyone was still in crisis mode. Sleep was just a memory at this point.

"You can...you don't have to stay," Morgan said, noticing how weary Sara looked. "Get some rest. Don't worry about me, I'll be fine. My mom will be here eventually."

Sara smiled sadly. "Honestly, I don't want you to be alone. I've been alone in hospital waiting rooms. Too many times to count, actually. It's not a pleasant experience."

She didn't elaborate, but Morgan had heard a few things about Sara's past. And Sara looked like she was in the mood to talk. And although Morgan just wanted to close her eyes and fall asleep and wake up a year from now, she might as well have a conversation to pass the time.

"Does it get any easier?" Morgan asked softly, to get the ball rolling.

Sara shook her head. "Never." Morgan didn't know if Sara even knew what she was referring to, but appreciated the honest response.

"I know my dad is...well, sometimes he can be a real asshole. But he's worked hard on fixing that. Even I can see that. We really talked about things tonight. We were going to fix this, Sara. We were going to be okay. And now..."

"You know what, Morgan, I can't tell you that it's going to be okay because I don't know if it will be. And I'm not going to say Ecklie-your dad-has not been difficult to sympathize with over the years. But like you said, he's changing. He's not the cold-hearted guy who suspended me when I had a meltdown so many years ago. He's not the guy who tore our team apart. Something important happened to him and he's different now. I think his relationship with you is mellowing him. In such a good way."

Sara was quiet for a moment. Morgan waited patiently.

"I don't know how things will work out for him tonight. But he's a fighter. And at least...at least you got to reconcile somewhat if anything happens. You will never regret that."

Sara looked on the verge of tears. Morgan didn't know Sara Sidle all that well, but what she did know is that the girl was a bad ass. She took criminals down every day and made it look easy. So to see this normally stoic person she respected so upset made Morgan extra curious. When Sara didn't elaborate and instead started to focus on unraveling a piece of fabric from her worn out jeans, Morgan took a bite of her granola bar, a sip of coffee, and addressed the elephant in the room.

"Did...did you get to reconcile things with your father?"

Morgan almost instantly regretted the question; she shouldn't have known anything about Sara's past. She shouldn't listen to office gossip and she certainly shouldn't have made Sara aware that the gossip existed. But to her credit, Sara wasn't surprised by Morgan's curiosity. And, as it turned out, she was, in fact, in the mood to talk.

Sara sighed and shook her head. "No. No, we were far from reconciliation. Maybe if I had taken the time to get to know him better...but I was 11 and he could be an evil bastard. I mean, Ecklie was hard to work with sometimes but he was nothing like my father."

"I can't imagine what that's like," Morgan said softly. She wanted Sara to keep talking. _Needed_ Sara to keep talking.

"Oh, well, that's my story. I'm sure you don't want to hear about it right now. Maybe someday we can go somewhere and get a few alcoholic beverages and compare notes, but I know you've got a lot on your mind at the moment."

"If you want to talk, I want to listen."

Sara nodded and it seemed the two of them had an understanding. Sara hardly ever talked about her past and Morgan was terrified of her future. Maybe talking it out would soothe both of them.

After pouring herself another cup of coffee, Sara contemplated her words carefully. Morgan didn't mind. She had all the time in the world.

"My dad was smart. Very smart. But he had to drop out of high school to get a job and support his family, and soon after that, he met my mom and then I happened. He didn't plan any of this. And he took it out on us whenever he possibly could get away with it. I won't get into some of the stuff we went through because you're already traumatized enough, but believe me, it was bad. My mom and I ended up in the hospital so many times, the doctors stopped asking questions after a while. There's a certain point when you just turn things off and deal with the consequences. Sometimes even now I have to stop myself from doing it. Gil hates it when I just close my eyes and tune out. He always wants to talk about it, but I am so over talking about it. But he means well, so I try."

Morgan nodded but didn't say anything. Sara continued.

"Anyway, my mother had started showing signs of schizophrenia a few years after I was born, but it was a long time before anyone took it seriously. They all just thought it was side effects from how my dad treated her. It wasn't like she woke up one day and decided it would be a good day to kill her husband. Something inside her snapped. You know, it was funny...earlier that day, my dad was helping me with my math homework. Math was his favorite subject and it was the only thing we ever seemed to agree on. Maybe if he'd been able to graduate high school and go to college, he could have been a math teacher. While we sat at the kitchen table and he made me laugh even though I hated algebra with every fiber of my being, I knew that was my real dad. The monster; the man my mother murdered...that was just his ghost. The shell of a man so disappointed in his life that he could barely get through it. So you asked me if I got to reconcile things with him? Like I said, the answer is no. But I like to think that he know I loved him. That what he was fighting against was the idea of me and not actually the real me. It's taken me a long time and a lot of therapy to get to that point, and I don't always see it so clearly. But my dad did love me, and I loved him."

"Wow," Morgan murmured, not sure what else to say. "That's intense."

"It is. And I'm not trying to minimize what you're going through. But Morgan, just know, whatever happens with your dad tonight...he knows. He knows how you feel about him, and he knows that even if things have been difficult between you for so long, that doesn't mean you ever stopped loving him. And don't ever let yourself doubt that, because I know Ecklie. He's a good man. A hard ass, yes, but he's a good man and he'd do anything for you."

Morgan bit back the tears. Now was not the time. But this was what she needed to hear. She didn't need sympathy or someone to rub her back and assure her everything would be okay. All she needed was this. Someone who had been through it before. Someone who understood.

They were both quiet for a few minutes. The TV in the waiting room was muted because every 15 minutes the news would break in and give details about DB's granddaughter and Morgan's dad. Right now they were playing a Friends rerun. The one where Monica was stung by jellyfish. Morgan knew every single word by heart, but still watched with detached interest anyway.

Eventually her curiosity got the best of her again and she asked, "What gets you through the day when you think nothing else will?"

Sara smiled. "The little things. Solving a case. My dog Hank and his endless supply of drool. Listening to the Ramones at the end of a long day. And Gil, obviously. Even when he's not here, I can call him and listen to him talk about his day and everything is just...better. He knows everything about me. And it took a long time for me to open up to him but he was the only one who ever _wanted_ to know everything about me."

Morgan once took Greg out to a seedy bar on the strip, got him drunk, and asked him a million questions about Grissom and Sara. She'd never even met Gil Grissom, but the idea of a boss falling in love with his protégé and then following her to the jungle of Costa Rica was just so incredibly romantic to her. Greg confessed he had a crush on Sara in the earlier years, but it never worked out. And he was glad, because she and Grissom were so right for each other. Morgan wanted a love story like that.

"How...I mean, sorry if this is too personal but I'm dying to know...how did it happen between the two of you? How did you cross that line?"

Sara grinned. Morgan loved her gap-toothed friend's grin. It was so quirky and adorable.

"It was almost 7 years ago exactly. Literally a few days before Nick was kidnapped. Grissom and I had been going through some stuff together for a while-there was a close call at a mental institution, and there was that whole thing with your dad when I got suspended-and something just clicked for him. I had been there the whole time, every single second since I met him at the conference in 1998. It just took him a while to realize that I was answer to the question he never thought to ask. We weren't ready for each other before that point, but we've been making up for lost time ever since."

Morgan sighed. "That is so romantic."

Sara chuckled. "It is_ now._ The first four and a half years in Vegas are a different story completely. But we all have a journey, right? There were so many times I just wanted to call it quits; go back to San Francisco and forget about Grissom and his blue eyes."

"What made you stay?"

"Pride. And the lab, of course. Nick, Catherine, Greg, Doc Robbins, Super Dave, even Hodges. And Warrick, who I still think about every day. They were there when I had literally nothing else to believe in. What about you? What's keeping you here?"

Morgan shrugged. "My dad, of course. My friends. The lab."

"And maybe a certain dark-haired Texan?" Sara asked teasingly.

"Nick? Oh, come on. He doesn't think of me like that. I'm just the boss' daughter to him. A kid."

"Are you kidding? Morgan, he came here to check on you, like, twice. Just a few hours after he declared he was done with CSI forever. And I've seen you check your phone a few times, has he been texting you?"

"Well...yes. But he always texts me."

"He only texts me every now and then," Sara said seriously. "Maybe it's not...something yet, but if you two keep going the way you are now, we may have another love story on our hands soon."

Morgan was blushing. She knew she was blushing and Sara knew she was blushing. This was not the right time to be blushing. But she couldn't help it-Morgan had a crush on Nick that was getting weirder and stronger every day. So this was like music to her ears.

"Miss Brody?" A doctor with a clipboard appeared in the waiting room and Morgan's heart skipped a few beats. Sara gripped her hand. Morgan appreciated the support.

"That's-I'm Morgan. Miss Brody."

"Miss Brody, your father is going to be fine. The bullet missed all the vital organs and he didn't lose a lot of blood. The surgery is almost finished. You can see him soon."

Morgan exhaled and felt every nerve in her body relax. _Thank god._ Sara gave her a small hug and said, "See? It's all good."

"Thank you," Morgan said gratefully. "Thank you for everything."


End file.
